From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.20010903110000.018cfa08@mail.real.com> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Fariborz 'Skip' Tavakkolian" Subject: Re: [9fans] dull question #1 In-Reply-To: <3B91A8F8.A2943C91@home.com> References: <20010815015220.6F5F219A27@mail.cse.psu.edu> <3B7ACCB1.E6AFF32A@null.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2001 11:00:00 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: e8b3b45a-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 For purely nostalgic reasons, induced by this thread, I fired up my old 3B2/400, 630 and an ancient 5620. It reaffirmed why I liked the 630 so much. In fact the last program I wrote that had any graphical elements in it was for the 630. The reminiscing also convinced me that, having Plan9, I don't miss any of it. At 08:40 AM 9/3/2001 GMT, Gregg Wonderly wrote: > > >"Douglas A. Gwyn" wrote: > >> dmr@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote: >> > in use. One real problem was the long startup time: >> > about 9 minutes to download the system, which had to be >> > done perhaps daily because neither of the terminals had >> > more than a small ROM (no flash, no floppy). >> >> In later commercial versions, the "layers" system was >> preloaded (in terminal ROM), which helped a lot. >> >> By the way, I have a bunch of 5620s and a coule of 630s >> I plan to restore then find good homes for. If anybody >> has others (also 730s) they want to contribute, feel >> free to contact me about shipping/pickup. > >I wrote a window manager for the 730 that made it possible to >tile windows so that you could get more apps loaded on the >terminal without having to size/resize windows to small boxes >when you weren't using them. We (at Indian Hill and other >exptools users) used the 730 (and 630) at 9600 baud for many >years and then they made us switch to ISDN D-channel. > >The only cool thing about ISDN was that we got 7 virtual ports >(ethernet did too) out of it so that you could connect >to 7 different machines (if they had X-25 packet interfaces for >D-channel traffic) at the same time and start layers and then >open 7 different windows to those hosts. If you had the 4MB >memory upgrade, this was perfectly wonderful. With a few >other apps loaded the terminal just rocked! Too bad that it was >cancelled by NCR when they took control of it... It truely was >one of the first examples of an awesome network appliance! > >Wow, just had to get that off my chest... > >Gregg Wonderly > >